He motioned Bouthland forward and the marine pulled the skins from the doorway of the largest structure. Peyton stood beside Buchan and Cull near the entrance and they stared into the gloom where a group of men, women and children lay still. Peyton counted quickly: seventeen, he concluded, and an infant or two. No one in the mamateek moved or spoke or even looked through the open entranceway to acknowledge the presence of the strangers.
Cull said, “What’s wrong with them, do you think?”
Buchan suddenly remembered Butler and called him to his side. “Tell them they have nothing to be afraid of,” he ordered.
The marine did so. After a moment he said, “They don’t seem to understand, sir.”
“Well, damn it, say something else. Try another language.”
“Yes sir,” Butler said and he stumbled through the same words in Swedish, Finnish and a ragged version of German without success.
“All right, all right,” Buchan said finally and he forced himself to continue smiling at the frozen tableau of bodies in the dimly lit shelter. “We will have to make do.”
Peyton said, “It might help if those of us in view put our firearms away.” Buchan nodded agreement and Peyton and Cull set their rifles down and Buchan dropped his pistol and cutlass on the snow. He held his hands in the air and walked towards the mamateek and stood in the entranceway.
“I am Lieutenant David Buchan,” he said cheerfully, “of the HMS Adonis.”
The faces in the room turned slowly towards a man near the back of the mamateek who stood finally and approached the white man. He was fully six feet in height and dwarfed the lieutenant he stood before. His long black hair was coloured with red ochre, as were his face and hands and long leather cloak. Buchan extended his hand and the Indian accepted it and they exchanged words in their own languages. Buchan motioned Cull and Peyton forward and introduced them and the Indian returned their smiles and shook their hands. He turned and spoke to the people still lying about the fireplace and several of them stood and came forward to shake hands with the white men in their doorway.
Within minutes the entire camp was assembled — thirty-eight Peyton counted altogether — and greetings were exchanged among members of both parties. After an initial period of wariness, the women began examining the dress of the white men, touching the material and buttons, and talking loudly among themselves. All of Buchan’s party but Richmond had set their rifles aside. Handkerchiefs and small knives and other articles of interest the party had among them were gathered and presented to the Indians and half a dozen marten furs were given to them in return.
After the exchange of presents a cooking fire was kindled, a girl kneeling to strike sparks into a ball of tinder. Peyton guessed her to be around twelve years old. She looked up to see him watching and he smiled at her and nodded. He knelt beside her and cupped his hands to encourage the flame as it caught. The tinder she used was a tuft of down from the breast of a blue jay. The girl blew gently and added small shavings of wood to the fire. Their heads were so close together he could smell the oil in her hair.
Large caribou steaks were roasted, and sausages made of seal fat and eggs were presented to the white men. They sat about the fireplace and ate and talked among themselves while smiling and making gestures to their hosts to indicate how much they enjoyed the food and how full they were. They drank fresh water out of birchbark cups sewn with spruce root.
Corporal Bouthland spoke up to say the Red Indians were not as large as he had been given to believe they would be, the tallest among them being the first man to approach Buchan that morning, who seemed to have some sway over the group.
“They look more like people of the Continent than Indians, I should say,” Butler announced.
Richmond turned to the marine. “Do you get a word of what this lot are saying?”
“I’m afraid not, no.”
Richmond grunted and shook his head, as if he had thought it a cockamamie idea from the start.
By 10 a.m., the party had spent all of three and a half hours in the company of the Red Indians. Buchan sat with the tall chief and drew a rough map in the dirt and used gestures to indicate his wish to return to the place where the gifts had been left and to carry these up to the lake. The white men stood and made ready to leave and the chief pointed to himself and two of his companions to indicate they would accompany the party. When this became clear, Corporal Bouthland requested permission to remain with the Indians as it would allow him to make repairs to his rackets. Private Butler volunteered to stay behind with him.
They reached their previous night’s camp at the riverhead before noon, and seeing nothing in the nature of goods or gifts as had been intimated by Buchan, the tall chief left to return to the lake but sent the other two on with the white men. They found the river opened, which made for difficult going on the narrow fringe of ice that remained at the shoreline, and the group marched in single file to navigate their way. One of the Indians walked ahead of Buchan and the second followed behind the party. By mid-afternoon, they came within sight of the fire kept by the remainder of Buchan’s expedition and the two Indians pointed and carried on a brief conversation and within minutes the man at the back of the group turned and fled towards the lake.
“He’s running,” Reilly shouted and the entire group stopped and turned upriver.
Taylor said he was still within half a musket shot, but Buchan ordered everyone to lower their rifles. He gestured to the last Indian to tell him he was free to join his companion but he did not and the party continued on to the sledge camp where he was presented with a pair of trousers and vamps and a flannel shirt. He changed out of his leather cassock and leggings and was so pleased with his new dress that he shook hands again with each man in the party. Buchan also showed him the store of blankets, woollen wrappers, shirts, beads, knives and other goods, and indicated they were all to be carried to the lake.
They sat to a meal of cocoa and salt fish and the white men carried on a conversation of worry and discontent while maintaining a cordial appearance towards their guest. Cull and Hughster were of the belief that the Indian who’d left them after sighting the fire may have come away with the impression that a party of men were secreted here to take them captive or kill them.
Buchan nodded. “I share your concerns,” he said, “but the presence of this individual,” and he gestured towards the Indian with his chin and smiled broadly when he met the man’s gaze, “is insurance enough for the lives of Butler and Bouthland. The good treatment he continues to receive will speak against any rumours currently being spread by his companion.” He stooped to the fire and lifted the kettle clear and poured more hot water for himself and for their Red Indian guest.
They woke next morning to a storm of sleet and blowing snow with wind out of the northeast. Buchan left eight men at the camp and the rest lowered their heads and pushed on into the bleak weather, walking single file up the river. Once they reached the lake the Indian ran ahead of the group at points and returned to walk with the lieutenant. Within half a mile of the mamateeks he pointed to an arrow sticking up out of the snow on the ice. There was a recent sledge track nearby.
They reached the Red Indian’s camp at 2 p.m. and found it deserted. The shelters had been left in a state of disarray. Everything of any value or use was taken from them but for a few caribou hides and a row of long shank bones hanging from the rafters.
A fire was recovered from the coals of the firepit in the largest mamateek and the men set about drying their boots and stockings. They boiled the marrow out of one of the caribou shanks to make a broth. There was very little conversation. The Indian seemed not to understand what had happened in this place or why. While the others ate he moved about the mamateek to tidy and set it in order as if to say he expected his people to return shortly. Several times he pointed in the direction of the opposite shore, which the white men took to indicate where he thought they had gone. The gesture was accompanied by a strained, peculiar laughter.
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br /> “That bugger’s a bit queer, I’d say,” Richmond said.
Tom Taylor shrugged. “I’d be maze-headed meself if I was in his place.”
The dirty weather worsened as night fell and the doorway was closed up with caribou skins. The noise of the wind in the trees and the hail and sleet against the sides of the mamateek made it conceivable that a party of any number could steal upon the shelter without being heard and Buchan divided the men into two watches to sit under arms through the night. Peyton was a member of the first watch and he and his group sat spaced around the circular floor with only the sullen light of the fire to see by. No one spoke.
The morning he started out from his father’s winter house, Peyton had stuffed a small parcel tied up in a piece of muslin cloth into his knapsack and he took it out now, unwrapping a sheaf of papers written over by hand. It was too dark to read and he flipped through them blindly, running the tips of his fingers across the pages.
Reilly was sitting nearest him and leaned forward to peer. “What’s that you got there?” he said.
Peyton shook his head.
“Cassie,” Reilly whispered and Peyton nodded without looking up from the pages.
John Senior had left Peyton behind at the winter house during his first year in Newfoundland to watch over Cassie, though he’d begged to be taken trapping. Near midnight on Christmas Eve, Cassie had come to Peyton’s room and shaken him awake. She was fully dressed and had already pulled on a heavy overcoat.
“What’s wrong?” Peyton asked.
“Get up,” she said. “It’s nearly time.”
When he came into the kitchen she was standing at the door with the musket his father had left them. She was tamping powder into the barrel.
“The time,” she said.
“What are you doing?”
“The time, John Peyton.”
He pulled out the new gold pocket watch given to him by his father before he left for the traplines and turned the face to the light of the candle on the table. “Three of twelve.”
“Get your coat on now. Hurry.”
She stepped out the door and he followed behind her as quickly as he could. They stood just outside the house, the clearing at the door banked on both sides by drifts of snow piled above their heads. There was no wind. She lifted the rifle to her shoulder and cocked her head to one side. They stood that way a few moments more. Her lips were moving and Peyton leaned forward to hear her slowly counting down under her breath.
He looked up at the stars and shook his head. Then he heard them. Gunshots, two, three, maybe more. The few inhabitants up and down the shore standing outside their tilts and firing into the night to mark the day’s arrival. Cassie pulled the trigger, the roar of the rifle deafening, the flash of powder deepening the dark that followed.
Inside she poured them each a glass of rum. Then Cassie brought out the small package wrapped in muslin and tied with a length of twine. She placed it in his lap and went back to her seat. Peyton stared at the package without speaking. The rum shimmered in his belly like a sun-gall. He looked up at her.
“Open it,” she said.
He smiled stupidly as he tried the knots and unwrapped the cloth. “What is it?” he asked. He lifted the sheaf of papers clear and laid it flat on his lap. “Cassie?”
She brought the candle from the table so he could see more clearly. The top sheet was printed over in a loose, sloping hand. He leaned closer to read it. “‘The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice,’” he read aloud. He flipped through the pages, dozens of them, each written out in the same hand. Beneath Othello was a handwritten copy of The Tempest. Peyton was mystified. He had seen in her trunk all nine volumes of Nicholas Rowe’s stage edition of Shakespeare’s plays.
“It was a way to pass the time,” Cassie said, “when my mother was ill. Near the end she slept most of the day and night and I was too tired to just read. I thought you might like to have them.”
Peyton stared at her, his mouth opening and closing uselessly. He stood up and placed the papers in her lap. “I have something for you,” he said. She heard his feet hammering the stairs, a scuffling noise from his room overhead. When he came back into the kitchen he held one hand behind his back. “Close your eyes,” he told her. “Put out your hand.” He placed a small leather pouch in her palm.
Cassie emptied the bag in her lap and held each item in turn in the light. The carved antler. The bird skulls. The fire stone. “Where did you get these?”
“Out on Swan Island. John Senior found the pouch in a cave along the shore.”
“They’re beautiful, John Peyton.”
He nodded and blushed, embarrassed to be the object of her gratitude. Besides which, he had told her so little of the truth of the gift’s origins that he felt he had somehow lied to her.
She had cajoled him into reading through Othello with her, and they took on parts as necessary to play off the lead characters, their heads leaning together over a candle. Peyton read tentatively and Cassie prompted him by touching a finger to his forearm, whispering the pronunciation of each word that brought him up short. She seemed to have the play memorized and sometimes recited lines with her eyes closed. He never imagined people could speak so nakedly from the heart. When Cassie said, That I did love the Moor to live with him, my downright violence and storm of fortunes may trumpet to the world, he could not find his place on the page. And that same lost feeling came to him in the Indian shelter now as he fingered the pages in the near dark.
The sleet and snow continued into the next morning. Buchan had his men divide the blankets and shirts and tin pots they had carried up from the sledge camp among the mamateeks and they set out across the ice in the direction the Indian had pointed the day before. He ran ahead of the group in a zigzag pattern as if tracing a path that no one else could see and sometimes looked behind to the white men to motion to the distant shoreline. Before they had travelled a mile onto the ice the Indian edged to his right a ways and stopped still for several moments. Without looking back then he fled across the lake. “Jesus, Jesus,” William Cull said, and the party picked up its pace in the face of the gale until they reached the spot where the Indian had paused.
The bodies were about a hundred yards apart, stripped naked and lain on their bellies. The heads of both marines had been cut from the torsos and carried off. The flesh at their necks was flayed ragged as if a blunt blade had been used to behead them and loose scarves of blood draped the snow above the mutilation. Their backs were pierced by arrows. The group stood over the scene in a stunned silence until one of the Blue Jackets in the party turned away from the bodies and vomited. The sound of his retching unleashed a string of curses and several of the men, including Peyton, dropped to their knees and threw up into the snow as well.
They covered the bodies with spruce branches and secured the branches with stones dug from underneath the snow on the nearest point of land which they named Bloody Point. Buchan read from his prayer book and those that knew the words joined him in repeating the Twenty-third Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer. Then the men turned away and began walking towards the headwaters of the river.
Richmond and Taylor had threatened biblical revenge over the mutilated corpses of their companions and in some measure had recruited the remaining marines and Matthew Hughster to their cause, but Buchan had insisted on an immediate retreat. Only three men had their rifles with them and there was likely to be larger numbers of Indians on the lake than they had seen in the single camp. It was possible that a party of them had already been dispatched to ambush the eight men left behind with the sledges and this thought alone made Buchan anxious to get back to them. At the headwaters of the river the men stopped to eat bread and refresh themselves with rum. A column was organized and those with rifles stood at the front and rear while those with only pistols or cutlasses travelled between. They walked single file back to the camp where the rest of the party waited for them.
The rapid thaw that followed the sleet storm m
ade the trip down the river more treacherous than it had been coming up. The ice had come away from the banks below the sledge camp and the men packed their knapsacks with as much provision as they could carry and left the sleighs behind. They constantly fell through the jagged ice and soaked themselves and scraped their shins raw. Occasionally pans broke loose and carried men into open water and they had to be rescued with extended walking sticks or ropes thrown from the shore. In the stretches where the ice was still solid, the rush of water from the river above and a steady rain had covered it in several inches of water that numbed the men’s feet and galled away the skin still clinging to their ankles and heels. They reached the camp they’d struck on the twenty-first well past dark, completing a journey of thirty-two miles in a single day.
Each of the next three days the party travelled eighteen miles or more, often walking knee-deep in freezing water or stumbling through rotten ice that sliced at their clothing and skin. There was near total silence among them but for the encouragement shouted by Buchan and they moved forward with the somnambulant expressions of sleepwalkers. Partway through each day’s march Peyton lost all feeling in his legs and feet and watched them moving as if they belonged to another man’s body. Even Richmond seemed to have exhausted his reserves and plodded stupidly ahead, sometimes falling to his hands and knees. At night most of the group complained of swollen legs and Buchan had them rub their calves with a mixture of rum and pork grease, which offered some relief. Each night one or more of the party started awake from a dream of Butler’s perfectly blond head on a stake, of Bouthland’s eyes as dead and sightless as the mole on his cheek. Some tried desperately to stay awake then for fear of where their dreams would take them, but exhaustion always pulled them under. In the morning Buchan roused each man personally and he worried at their heels throughout the day to keep them out of the river and moving towards the coast.
River Thieves Page 12